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21st Century Issues for Adult, Vocational and Higher Education research paper

The success of the adaptation process of students in educational activities and social environment encourages students, as the impact of their intellectual activity, enhances the overall vitality and maintains high efficiency.  In addition, successful adaptation of students in international environment essentially determines the motivation, character and efficiency of training activities for the students.  The study of psychological aspects of adaptation in education is associated mainly with the study of external and internal factors to adapt to tertiary education, in particular, to such of its fundamental components, as cognitive activities and interpersonal interactions.  This involves the allocation of didactic (teaching) and psycho-social (communicative) adaptation.

Many foreigners at universities face the challenges, new experience and different issues.  A distinctive feature of the Australian education market is its consolidation.  Educational institutions merged to form large and small educational corporations.  For foreign students it is beneficial that within each of these associations, they can study various courses, and to get translation from one to another and to do that without any additional exams, as described in Relevance for Higher Education.  Thus, having entered a time without examination by an English language course, a person can reach a bachelor's degree within a single structure.  Since there is a structure with the different composition of the components, it allows realizing any, even the most ambitious plans.

The state in its basis, the Australian education system is built on the British model.  Today the country has 40 universities, more than 450 colleges with an enrollment of more than one million students and about 550 centers teaching English.  Taken together, these institutions offer courses that can satisfy all the demands of training.  Recently, the education system, introducing the combination of English and partly in the American scheme of education, includes unique Australian training schemes for foreign students at colleges and universities, as stated in Higher education.

Today, the country has 38 public and two private universities.  In these studies, total of the students in these universities is 700 thousand, including students of daytime, evening and correspondence courses.  The most popular specialties are those, related to the business and the economy.  More than half of foreign students come to learn exactly these specialties.  After them follows the natural, human and social science, art, and then - engineering and technological specialties.  At many universities there are also preparatory departments (Foundation Programs).  This is a bridge between secondary education obtained in foreign educational institutions, and teaching at a university in Australia.  They provide foreign applicants knowledge and skills necessary for successful education in the university.  Feature of the preparatory office in Australia is that universities reserve in advance for their audience places in the first year.  Admission to the preparatory department is carried out twice a year - at the beginning and at the middle of the year (sometimes three times).  For admission a person must have high school diploma and a good knowledge of English (at the level of 6.0 for IELTS and 550-570 points on the TOEFL).  Bachelor's degree in Australia is received during 3 years, except for seeking knowledge in medicine, law, engineering and natural sciences. Masters programs are designed for 1-2 years depending on specialization.

And, as stated by Nesdale & Todd, objectives of internationalization of university education cannot be achieved unless students themselves are fully committed to developing cross-cultural awareness, and willingly inclined to engage in inter-cultural interactions.   As a fact, the distinction between home and international students may be considered to be too general when it is considered that both these groups are far from homogenous.

Nowadays, the positioning of international students reflects the ambivalence that universities feel towards them.  For many, international students are simultaneously a source

of contempt because of their inadequate English language skills, resentment and, paradoxically, anxiety.  There is the need to confront the inappropriate conflation of fee-paying with international student status, the caricature of international students that was constructed through the discourses, and the valorization of a form of academic identity within which academics surrendered their agency.